Beatrix of the Netherlands

William I (1772 to 1843) was the first King of the Netherlands and the founder of the Dutch monarchy. Born in The Hague as the son of William V, the last stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, he fought against the French invasion of 1795 and then spent nearly two decades in exile in Britain and Prussia. He returned in 1813 as sovereign prince and was proclaimed king in 1815, ruling Luxembourg as grand duke at the same time. Nicknamed the Merchant King for the canals, shipping lines and industry he financed, he lost the southern provinces in the Belgian Revolution of 1830 and abdicated in 1840 in favour of his son William II. With his wife and first cousin Wilhelmina of Prussia he was the ancestor of every Dutch monarch since.

William II (1792 to 1849) was King of the Netherlands and Grand Duke of Luxembourg from 1840 until his death. Born in The Hague and educated in Berlin and at Oxford, he made his name as a soldier, serving under Wellington in Spain and commanding Dutch and Belgian troops at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, where he was wounded. As Prince of Orange he tried and failed to hold the southern provinces during the Belgian Revolution of 1830. Succeeding his father William I in 1840, he is remembered above all for accepting in 1848 the liberal constitution drafted by Johan Rudolph Thorbecke, which moved real power to parliament and shaped the modern Dutch monarchy. He married Anna Pavlovna of Russia, a sister of two tsars.

Prince Frederick of the Netherlands (1797 to 1881) was the second son of King William I and Wilhelmina of Prussia and a career soldier in both Dutch and Prussian service. Born in Berlin during his family's exile, he rose to field marshal, commanded the Dutch forces in the Ten Days' Campaign against Belgium in 1831 and was for decades the senior military figure of the young kingdom. He served as Grand Master of Dutch freemasonry for more than sixty years and was a well known patron of charities, schools and the arts. In 1825 he married Princess Louise of Prussia. A younger brother of King William II, he died at Wassenaar in 1881.

Princess Marianne of the Netherlands (1810 to 1883) was the youngest daughter of King William I and Wilhelmina of Prussia and a sister of King William II. Born in Berlin while her family was in exile, she married Prince Albert of Prussia in 1830; the marriage ended in separation and divorce, which cost her her standing at the Prussian court and kept her away from Berlin for the rest of her life. She bought the Reinhartshausen estate in the Rhine valley and built a great palace at Kamenz in Prussian Silesia, becoming known as a collector of paintings and as a builder of churches, schools and roads for the districts she owned. She died in the Rhineland in 1883.

William III (1817 to 1890) was King of the Netherlands and Grand Duke of Luxembourg from 1849 until his death. Born in Brussels to King William II and Anna Pavlovna of Russia, he resented the constitutional limits his father had accepted in 1848 and clashed repeatedly with his ministers across a long reign in which slavery was abolished in the Dutch colonies, the railways spread and the country industrialised. His attempt to sell Luxembourg to France touched off the international crisis of 1867. After his first wife Sophie of Wurttemberg and all three of their sons had died, he married Emma of Waldeck and Pyrmont in 1879, and their only child Wilhelmina succeeded him in 1890.

Princess Sophie of the Netherlands (1824 to 1897) was the only surviving daughter of King William II and Anna Pavlovna of Russia and a sister of King William III. Born in The Hague, she married Carl Alexander, the future Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, in 1842 and spent the rest of her life in Germany as his consort. She was a serious patron of music and scholarship in a Weimar still living on its literary reputation, and when Goethe's last grandson left the poet's papers to her she founded the Goethe Archive there in 1885, the institution that grew into the Goethe and Schiller Archive. She died in Weimar in 1897.

Wilhelmina of Prussia (1774 to 1837) was the first Queen of the Netherlands, as the wife of King William I. A daughter of King Frederick William II of Prussia, she was born in Potsdam and married her first cousin, the future Dutch king, in Berlin in 1791. The couple spent nearly twenty years in exile after the French overran the Dutch Republic, returning in 1813, and she became queen when her husband took the royal title in 1815. Reserved by temperament and energetic in charitable work, she was the mother of King William II, Prince Frederick and Princess Marianne. She died in The Hague in 1837, three years before her husband's abdication.

Prince Alexander of the Netherlands (1818 to 1848) was the second son of King William II and Anna Pavlovna of Russia and a younger brother of King William III. He was born in Brussels, at a time when his grandfather's kingdom still included the southern provinces that later became Belgium. Educated for a military career, he served as an officer in the Dutch army and navy and took a particular interest in the technical side of the fleet. He never married. He died on the Portuguese island of Madeira in 1848 at the age of twenty-nine and was buried with his family in the royal vault of the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft.

Prince Henry of the Netherlands (1820 to 1879), known as Henry the Navigator, was the third son of King William II and Anna Pavlovna of Russia and a younger brother of King William III. He went to sea as a boy, sailed to the Dutch East Indies and rose to vice admiral, and campaigned all his life for Dutch shipping, harbour works and the sea route to the Indies. From 1850 until his death he represented his brother as governor, and later as lieutenant-representative, in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, where he lived at Walferdange and was genuinely popular. He married twice but had no children, and died in Luxembourg in 1879.

William, Prince of Orange (1840 to 1879) was the eldest son of King William III and Sophie of Wurttemberg and, for almost all of his life, heir to the Dutch throne. Born in The Hague, he was far closer to his mother than to his father and quarrelled bitterly with the king, who refused to let him marry the Dutch noblewoman he had chosen. He spent his last years largely in Paris, where his open-handed and extravagant life earned him the half-affectionate nickname Citizen Prince at home. He died there in 1879, unmarried and childless, which left his younger brother Alexander as heir and prompted their father's second marriage in the same year.

Alexander, Prince of Orange (1851 to 1884) was the youngest son of King William III and Sophie of Wurttemberg and heir to the Dutch throne from 1879 until his death. Born in The Hague, he was an intelligent and bookish man with a lasting interest in the sciences, but he was estranged from his father and lived a withdrawn life in the capital, taking as little part as he could in public ceremony. He never married. His death in 1884 left his half-sister Wilhelmina, then three years old, as the only heir of the House of Orange-Nassau, and so set up the long reign that carried the dynasty into the twentieth century.